


you taste like a thunderstorm

by supernatasha



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-06
Updated: 2015-03-06
Packaged: 2018-03-16 14:17:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3491483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/supernatasha/pseuds/supernatasha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>I dream about you all the time. It's the only thing that makes sleep worth it.</em>
</p><p>Chapter 1: Letters to Kira - Five Things I Love About You<br/>Chapter 2: Aftermath - (And One I Don't)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. (Malia)

1\. The Way You Sleep

You sleep on your stomach, in a shirt too big for you or a tank top too small for you or nothing at all. It drives me crazy. You know that, right? You know I spent hours staring at you in the dark, the defined muscles of your back smoothing into curves, hovering my cheeks just above your warmth without touching, wondering if you're dreaming about me.

I hope you are. I dream about you all the time. It's the only thing that makes sleep worth it.

Once, I woke you when the moon was just a sliver in the sky and asked what you were dreaming of, if it was me. You stared at me with your eyes wide open and simply said, "Fire."

The next morning, you said you didn't remember waking at all.

It's okay. I remember. I memorize every moment you're asleep, curled up around me, the feel of your knees against my back, the scent of ozone that lingers around you even when you haven't summoned thunder in days.

The first time I ever stayed awake just to watch you sleep, that time you slept over after our senior homecoming, I saw dark claws rising from your long fingers, claws of a kitsune, claws sharp enough to cut through my flesh.

I think I was scared of it once; knowing that someday in your sleep, you may awake with your claws outstretched digging into my soft flesh and I will gasp before the blood wells up, and just before your eyes flutter open, my scars will close, leaving nothing but brilliant red droplets on my skin. It did scare me then, I'll admit.

Now, it just kind of turns me on.

2\. How You Taste

I love the way you taste the way I love to run as coyote, the way I want all four feet on the ground with my nose in the air and the woods flitting by, the way I yearn for pleasure when I abandon this human body and find myself back in the beast that was home for seven years –

Yes, I do love that taste.

It tastes like summer, like the dew-moistened soil of the pale rising dawn, like my tongue tracing down your throat and the little sounds you make when I do. It tastes like the sharp clear cold pang of the first winter chill, like your nipples between my teeth, hard.

You taste like thunderstorms, like the humid air and the cool rain.

This is how you taste. This is my tongue between your legs, my lips sucking at your clit, your wilderness, you're the woods, you are my woods and I am running and panting and you come against my mouth and I can't think when I am this hungry.

I want to devour you, and sometimes not even in a sexy way.

Do you remember when we first moved in together? That little apartment we shared with the undergrad from UCSD, our first year away from the pack, the first year I had you all to myself? Your scent lingered there in the air, heavy, heady.

I always taste that apartment in you.

Our own little life.

3\. When We Fuck

It's always about hands.

I guess it usually is when it's just the two of us. It wasn't like that with Stiles, you know. Maybe it wasn't like that for you and Scott either. But us? Hands. It's delicate wrists and fingers buried to the third knuckle, it's your palms on my breasts under my shirt, and my nails digging into your hips, it's your lifeline flat on my stomach when you're going down on me and your fateline resting on my ribs, and I'm pretty sure I don't exist unless you're touching me, somewhere, somehow.

My hands feel too big, too clumsy, too pale. I always have to quantify it.

This, this is where your fingers fit. This is where you kissed my palm after I fucked you and you tasted yourself and the saltiness of sweat on my skin.

I think the first time we fucked without hands was when we moved to New York – it was the sex shop on 7th avenue, the one we ducked into because we'd spotted another kitsune and that familiar spike of fear ran through us, the one where we thought it'd been years and we'd escaped that life, but here was someone from that same old mess of things, someone with more tails and more complications, and the best we could think of was that sex shop reeking of patchouli where we brought our first vibrator to congratulate ourselves on getting away.

Do you think it was a celebration, what we did?

Or do you think we knew then, even when we weren't admitting it, that things weren't the same as they used to be?

That just our hands weren't enough?

4\. The Color of Your Hair

I know you dyed that first streak of white in your hair. I could smell the dye from where I was sitting on the kitchen table and you would walk in through the door with dinner from a new takeout place every night. It was a good job, I'll give you that. It wasn't obvious. You did it over a week, subtle, slow. Gas station bathrooms? Stall at work? Salon?

Anyway, I could tell. Even when the tiredness started setting in, when I was sleeping more and more, the changing world outside suddenly too fast to keep up and you in here, not changing at all.

You did it for me, I know that now.

I loved your hair most when the dye job started fading away and the pitch black color started to come through again, silk and sand, ink.

Your dark hair, with my fingers threading through them. It was always like darkness trying to escape from your head. It stuck up everywhere when I was through kissing you and you would lay back and it spread over the pillow like a halo behind your head.

Sometimes I would see the gray streak in it, a leftover strand, something small but infuriating, a lie, a deception, and it was enough to make me angry – bitter even. But let's not go through that again.

My favorite thing to do with your hair: to wash it in the shower, lathering it up and running my nails over your scalp, the warm water immersing both of us in a little place where there aren't many spaces left between us to hide, and you are here, sighing into the crook of my neck, bubbles rippling on your shoulders.

If there was a way to take a hammer to my skull and crush the hard bone to show you that sticky pink thing inside so desperately in love with you, I think I would have shattered my head long ago.

5\. Your Eyes

Your eyes are what I find, glowing and gleaming, like a firefly whose light extinguishes when you blink under the dark veil of your lids, with little stubby eyelashes against your cheekbones. Your eyes are what I find in the dark, universes on their own, the gold of your irises my religion and I worship, even when there's no words left and some days are hazy, hazier than others – my memory, you know how it is.

Gold, as peculiar as the cast inside a bare bulb, it cuts through the haze. Sometimes I feel it burning through my retinas and I have to blink and look away, cutting short my prayers.

I like when they're brown, when they don't feel like they're on fire.

I like when they're looking at me.

Always your eyes that I can pick out.

I see others you know. Lydia has a hazel that turns green in the sun when she's giving speeches under fluorescent lights, Scott has the red of an Alpha with the same compassion he had when we were all kids, and Stiles – oh. Stiles doesn't come around anymore. It's what happens, isn't it? To us? But not to you.

Maybe that's why I recognize your eyes easier than others. The brown and the gold.

Or maybe I love you, I think that's why.

It doesn't matter now. I don't think I'll seeing them for much longer. Knowing I'll always know your eyes is a comfort, no matter how things go from here. Your eyes are a beacon, and they'll bring me home again.

Home to you.


	2. (Kira)

1\. Saying Goodbye

Scott comes first. He looks tired; it's a long drive from upstate. He brings flowers. They're nice. Kira thanks him and sets them in a vase she doesn't remember ever buying. Maybe Malia had brought it. The red of the roses matches the red pattern.

"I'm sorry," Scott offers.

Kira thanks him again.

"I know what it's like. I mean, with Stiles, you know? I've been through it. If you want to talk –"

She doesn't thank him this time.

Derek is next to come, on a bike with a helmet. He'd been doing that a lot lately. Helmets, prescription pills in a little orange bottle, seatbelts. Kira wonders what it means. Derek's hair is peppered with grey, his beard longer than Kira remembers it ever being. The first thing out of his mouth, as always, "Have you seen Cora?"

Kira shakes her head. "When was the last time you heard from her?"

"It's been a while," Derek answers evasively. In this world, _a while_ could be anywhere from a few weeks to a few years. He's always looking for her these days, it seems. Kira wonders if she's alive.

"When is Lydia coming?" he asks.

And, of course, the words are barely out of his mouth when the bell rings.

"Fucking banshees," Kira hears him mutter as she goes to open the door.

Lydia looks great, as always. Her hair is coiffed up. Her pantsuit is black, fitted. "I'm not here for long," she says right away, then hugs Kira, then adds, "I told my guards to wait downstairs, I'd be done soon."

Her guards, of course. It's something they usually joke about. But nobody feels like joking today. Lydia sits on the sofa beside Scott, puts a hand on his knee and nods warmly. There is a bundle of letters on the coffee table, folded up into quarters. If anyone had bothered to count, they would have counted five.

"We've come a long way since Beacon Hills," Kira says quietly. "There have been too many losses."

They all agree. It had started with Allison, of course, and it hadn't ever quite gotten better. Derek wasn't the same after Braeden, Scott after Stiles. And now it's Kira's turn. She wonders who she'll have to say goodbye to next.

"What are you going to do now?" Lydia asks.

"There's always room in my pack, you're welcome to come back," Scott says. There are wrinkles under his eyes. Kira forces herself not to look. This is how it had started with Malia. "You too, Derek, if you want to come back."

Derek shakes his head once, quick, restless.

Kira agrees, "No."

"You can join me in D.C.," Lydia suggests.

It's an ever worse idea. She would be conspicuous there. A woman who never aged? Kira can only imagine. "I think it's time to move on. Head somewhere else. I can't stay in New York anymore. Maybe I'll go back to California, to my mom. It's been decades since I've seen her. And she is alone now, after my dad… well, after, you know."

They know.

"I'm sure she could use the company," Lydia nods. Then, "How old is your mom now?"

"She'll be celebrating 994 years next month," Kira says.

There is a silent sigh. It won't be a celebration. Humans and banshees lived about eighty years, werewolves and werecoyotes lived a hundred years – kitsune more than a thousand.

The unspoken statement is there: how many losses had Kira's mother seen, and how many more losses would Kira see?

They're all aging, they can all see it sitting here. Lydia's age brought grace. Her hair is nearly all snowy white now, only her eyebrows still a slight pink to recall the days she was a redhead. Derek is agitated, anxious. He never stays anywhere for long and there are entire months when they don't hear from him. Scott leads the largest pack in the country on a huge farm in upstate, but even he's begun the search for this pack's next Alpha.

Only Kira still looks like the girl they knew from high school, smooth unlined skin and raven's black hair, just three tails, still a child by kitsune standards.

"I think it was because of her time as a coyote," Scott finally says. "I think that aged her. Look at Derek. Look at me. We're fine."

No, they're not. Kira can see it, but she keeps silent. The _signs,_ the ones she should have been looking out for but didn't want to, the things Malia wrote in her letters about, the ones reflected back now on Scott and Derek's faces.

Lydia says, "I'll miss her. We're all going to miss her."

 _But none as much as me,_ Kira doesn't say.

 _I buried her alone,_ she doesn't say.

"Do you know she said the only thing she didn't love about me was when I said goodbye?" Kira tells them, gesturing at the letters on the table. They all hear her perfectly when she whispers, "Goodbye, Malia."

The room is too small for the four of them and their grief, their goodbyes all crowded together between the tables and vases Kira doesn't remember buying. It's a moment – not long, but it belongs to them.

Then there's a knock on the door and a voice is saying, "Madame President?" and Lydia is standing, Derek has his keys in his hand, Scott's phone is buzzing. The moment is over.

They have all said goodbye.


End file.
